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Business of Machining - Episode 117
239 Plays7 years ago
Survival Mode Although this term is usually in reference to stress, this time it's literal. Saunders gears up for a lesson in bushcraft.
Routine Maintenance - Like a Boss? Learning the inner workings of a machine is just as important as learning the inner workings of your brain.
Could Grimsmo's nightly walks and new to-do list system be paying off? For the past week, the team's been busting out SAGA pocket clips like nobody's business!
Click Image Below to See Post.
Check your to-do list and watch the David Allen TED Talk <--click here!
Badge It Up Saunders marvels at Grimsmo's Dura Vertical sticker collection. Speaking of stickers, SMW just stickered and shipped a box to Blackforest, Germany containing a Robin Renzetti-inspired, modified, lathe tool-post.
Click Image Below to See Video.
Robin Renzetti: THE SOLID TOOL POST MOUNT <--click here to watch
Intricacies of 5-Axis Machining Saunders delves into the specifics of the first UMC-750 5-axis part including the material, workholding, toolpaths, CAMplete, tooling, and how part of it KICKED HIS BUTT.
Wax, Wane, and Lightning Bolt Sometimes you don't realize your excitement and passion has waned until you suddenly get a jolt. Having 100% adoration for your profession 100% of the time is nothing to be guilty about---IT'S NORMAL!
Grimsmo: BTW, I crashed the lathe last week.
Saunders: You're just going to casually throw that in there 27 minutes into the podcast!?
Grimsmolocks & The Precious Real Estate Still on the hunt for a new shop, square footage is tricky to determine for a growing company. He doesn't want a space that's too big; he wants a space that's JUUST right.
Fly on the Wall (well, kinda) Saunders wishes he could shadow Grimsmo for a day, but only if he didn't know he was there. The question is, will a set of headphones and a laptop make him inconspicuous enough?
N2(1) WUT? GK is getting into cryogenics so they can freeze themselves and wake up in the future---j/k (at least about the freezing themselves part). Get the scoop on how and why they use cryo at GK!
The 1776 American Independence knife is about to be engraved with some 13 colony action for its BLADESHOW debut.
If you're in the neighborhood, come say hi!
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Transcript
John Grimsmough's Personal Routine
00:00:00
Speaker
Good morning and welcome to the business of machining episode 117. My name is John Grimsmough. My name is John Saunders. Good morning, my friend. Good morning. How are you? Fantastic today. Feeling good.
00:00:15
Speaker
slept. I was like so wanted to wake up to my alarm like and be just out and hard fast asleep. And I think I had like a stupid head cold again as well as probably a little bit of distress and anxiety which which wasn't helping. And so you know how everyone says you're not supposed to have screen time before bed? Right.
00:00:35
Speaker
I hate that because darn it, I like watching a little TV on my laptop. Of course, like most people, the average person thinks they're not. Well, that affects other people. That doesn't affect me, those studies. Yeah, you're special. Last night, I picked up a book, not on anything machine related
Outdoor Activities and Exercise
00:00:53
Speaker
on. I'm actually taking a survival class next month. Sweet. Yeah, it's this guy, John Canterbury. He has this book on woods and hiking and- Bushcraft.
00:01:05
Speaker
Yeah, that's exactly the term. And I looked up who he was and I couldn't believe it. His classes are like an hour and a half from here. So Buddy and I are going down next month. And I've been like enjoying this with William over the past year of like, you know, starting fires and like picking up sticks. I mean, just a little stuff. And so I was reading some of his Bushcraft book last night, which I didn't last very long. I was exhausted and I slept great. Yeah.
00:01:32
Speaker
Nice. Yeah. Yeah. I'm doing that too. Trying to read, um, lately I've been going for a walk late at night and then either read before or read after, but, uh, get 10 pages of reading done before bed and, you know, go through that routine and I'm pretty wiped. So I just fall, fall right asleep, which is great. Yeah. Yeah. The walk thing is interesting. Are you, uh, you still liking that?
00:01:55
Speaker
Oh yeah, I love it. Yeah. Yeah. The goal is to go for, you know, do some outdoor exercise every single day. Um, and it just, just so happens that, you know, nine, 10 o'clock is when I have a window of time where I can just go and not worry about it. Um, so yeah, sometimes 11 o'clock, but you know, if I'm going to do it, I'm going to do it. So, so yeah, go for 20, 20 to 40 minutes just around the neighborhood. And, uh, yeah.
00:02:21
Speaker
I like that you live in kind of like, how do you call it town? You could walk to the stores and stuff. That's kind of cool to me that's different than just walking through a neighborhood or something. Yeah, you've got your neighborhood, but otherwise it's in the middle of nowhere. Yeah. I like that too. Don't get me wrong. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, no, that looks good. New sticker I see on the Dura vertical.
00:02:48
Speaker
Yeah. I put up an orange vice sticker yesterday. I'm like, how do I not have an orange vice sticker on this machine yet? Right. And I had it sitting on
Machining Inspirations and Projects
00:02:55
Speaker
a bench. I'm like, uh, it's a Mari tool, MJK, fifth axis YouTube. I can't make out the other ones. Quality cam, Henry holsters, Prometheus flashlight.
00:03:06
Speaker
Angelo's a fissure knives. Yep. Cool. And yeah, some other stuff. Sweet. Mighty bite. Yeah. But yeah, well, speaking of badging up machines, I spent basically the last week making finishing and shipping the first five axis part.
00:03:26
Speaker
for the guy in Germany? Yeah, for Theo or technically Theo, but TA crafted. It's so cool to me that you meet somebody in Southern Germany doing their own thing, a relatively young individual, and he's mentioning, well, I was inspired by Robin Renzetti with this and Stefan Gotzwinder with this, and he watched our videos to learn Arduino back in the day. I think that's
00:03:54
Speaker
That's when it's kind of the reality meets what you sometimes wonder, like how influential or how helpful or just what is what, like what are the real results.
00:04:06
Speaker
And so he wants to do this modification that Robin Ranzetti has popularized where you basically take off the compound on a lathe. And I wish I could remember exactly why he was mentioning you don't need a compound, including you don't even need it for this normal 29.5 degree in feed for single point threading. I can't remember what that...
00:04:31
Speaker
We'll see if we can find like a Renzetti link or something in the YouTube, but it massively stiffens up your manual lathe because you still obviously have the carriage or the saddle and the cross slide, but you've removed a taller axis. You've removed one more set of Gibbs or moving parts and something that can be extended in or out.
00:04:53
Speaker
And Robin shows some video on his I think he did it on his hardened hlv, which is a great machine, but not what you don't think of as a rough hogging style machine. And he's partying again, traditionally a more difficult operation. And he's partying. I want to say it's a stainless steel. And it's just
00:05:11
Speaker
dead silent, taking a real chip. It's just like, okay, that is awesome. He talks about some of the ways he's pretensioned this part and scraped it and set screwed it in. Robin is very scientific in his approach. It was cool to see Theo want to do his own spin on it.
00:05:34
Speaker
The one quirk was Robins was cast iron, so it could be scraped most easily. I wasn't willing to run cast iron in the UMC. No, don't. Thanks, but no thanks.
00:05:46
Speaker
Luckily, there's nothing about the otherwise normally beneficial, what do you call it, stability dampening characteristics of cast iron as a great metal from machine tools and castings because of its ability to
00:06:05
Speaker
absorb and sorry, I'm blanking on the words, but it doesn't matter for here. So we ended up doing it out of 4140. It's a material we know pretty well. We buy a lot of, it'll be a little bit more difficult for him to scrape if he needs to, but I think, I don't think that's going to be a big issue. And it's certainly strong. And so what I spent the last week doing was setups, fifth access tool paths, tooling, complete true path. Like it was phenomenal.
00:06:36
Speaker
Is it everything you hoped it would be and more? It is actually legitimately and more. It made me realize I haven't truly been as excited about this tree. I feel guilty saying this, but it's the honest answer. I haven't been as excited about the machining trades as I was this week or last week in a long time. There was a day
00:06:57
Speaker
you know, some time ago, not that long ago, perhaps, I mean, I only bought my first Haas three years ago. And you know, before that, when I had the chance to see a vertical machining center in person, I mean, it was it was I was a surgeon, I was wholly focused on like, yeah.
00:07:12
Speaker
that machine is like it just is so so cool to me and I don't know what the analogy is like if it's like first time you've seen a Ferrari or race car or piece of artwork if you're an artist like there's just it just was oh my gosh and obviously you lose some of that because you deal with them every day now. Yeah.
00:07:32
Speaker
I actually would love to talk more about this if you want to hear it, but part of that part did kick my butt. I had a gouge in the adaptive.
00:07:46
Speaker
which I actually want to go back and look at, but I'm 99% sure it's my own fault. I had one semi-precarious work setup. It was just a roughing strategy to expose some holes before I moved it.
00:08:06
Speaker
into a much more secure setup. Part lifted up ever so slightly, caught it on video, ended up breaking the tool, which is why I didn't even realize it had happened until that occurred. Pretty sure that's why the gouge happened. The gouge was in a cosmetic part of the part where it's tapered in surface, but you can't have a gouge.
Five-Axis Machining Techniques
00:08:25
Speaker
I ended up dropping that whole plane around the part by 20,000. That then I believe is the reason why at the end of those toolpaths, as those toolpaths particularly at the top intersected sidewalls, because I had dropped them down 20,000,
00:08:47
Speaker
I just did it with stock to leave, I believe. I didn't change the parametric model. It ended up gouging the tool into the intersecting side walls that weren't stock to leave affected. Okay. I think I know what you mean. So you hacked it and there was a downside to it. Exactly.
00:09:07
Speaker
And I didn't want to thin those walls out because that starts to get into more of the structurally important part. I did a little bit of blending, and I don't think it looks horrible. Part of me is also kind of okay with, okay, hey, you know, I'm actually still pretty- Definitely. First part. Yeah, exactly.
00:09:24
Speaker
But Theo has to look at it every day or every time he's using it in a way. And generally speaking, I think it looks spectacular. And I had to hold a pretty tight tolerance on a couple of dimensions, and the UMC really had no problem. I was kind of curious to see how that would work. The surfacing quality toolpath was great. Most of it was positional, but I did do some true five-axis swarfs to deburbs and holes.
00:09:52
Speaker
I got the whole thing filmed. So obviously we'll get a video out on that. And I got to say that working with the workflow through TruePath was
00:10:06
Speaker
was something that I just love. The ability to see the machine move and have confidence. We did some spot drill taps where the spindle housing was well below the platter extent. Really? Literally, after I'd run the first part, I realized, OK, I don't have any anxiety about just hitting cycle start now. I just don't. Fun fact about TruePath, it doesn't know if your stock lifted up out of the vice. Too soon, John.
00:10:36
Speaker
too soon. No, it worked out great. We did the rock lock riser, so that let us do that more secure working holding after we kind of mounted it in situ like it would be on the lathe.
00:10:49
Speaker
So you put threaded holes in the bottom of the part and then you put the studs in the part? Yeah, exactly. Not into the part, sorry, into a spacer, aluminum spacer. We had a rock lock. The rock lock is just the four studs. So that mounts into the base. And so instead of mounting Theo's part directly to the rock lock base, we put a, I think it was two inch aluminum riser.
00:11:12
Speaker
And in that riser, we had five M6 tapped holes, which were the same pattern as Theo's Weiler lathe. So we just mounted his part into the thing, which has the other benefit of lifting it up, which we needed to lift it up to obviously get to all the areas of geometry without having any spindle collisions.
00:11:35
Speaker
Right, and I guess to check those spindle collisions, you post some code, use true path, and see if it hits, and see if you need more riser. Yes, and so there's two ways I've learned to do that. Number one, you do get a decent idea, especially on positional stuff, where the holder is. So you have to be conscious of your holder and your stick out in Fusion, but right now we're mostly using Mari tools, so that's relatively easy. Honestly, right now if I used
00:12:04
Speaker
Another one like we've got that big whatever Kaiser die show one. I would just fake it with a Mari tool because it's such a pain in the butt to build out holders in the mark. Yeah, my tools already there but basically you can see where your gauge length is that gives you gives you some idea or what you can do in true path is If you imported it
00:12:27
Speaker
into TruePath and it shows a collision. You can lie to TruePath and start lying about your tool height or your stick out or the gauge length until it doesn't crash. And then you've back solved into what you need to then do. So you need two more inches of clearance, whether that's a riser or a longer tool. Bingo. Because what you don't want to do is you don't want to go back and forth between TruePath and Fusion like 10 times because it is an import process.
00:12:56
Speaker
Okay. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, I think. Yeah. Cool. Yeah, but it's awesome. Were there any surprises that you were like, well, I didn't see that coming. I thought I would have a harder time getting a good surface finish in the first time I
00:13:12
Speaker
surface the part. I used a 3-16 ball nose because it has some tighter areas to it and it looked like crap. I mean, it looked horrible. I thought, okay, this is where you realize there's an art to this and I'm just going to have to...
00:13:28
Speaker
ship a part that doesn't look as good as I thought, and I thought, nope, nope, nope, let's get scientific. So we use the tool pre-setter. We looked at that tool. That tool was simply worn out. I had done a light roughing with it. I basically used that same tool to knock off the stair steps left from the adaptive.
00:13:46
Speaker
And I think it was a combination of just too much time in the cut. Maybe it got a little bit chipped or nicked or whatnot. And honestly, it could have been... I got big time corrected in a video, which is awesome. I very much...
00:14:03
Speaker
enjoy being better off for it. I mentioned this comment that I don't like buying certain types of tooling with coatings on them because I don't want the quote unquote aluminum style coating like TIN because I like to have a ball nose or a bull nose that I can use on any sort of material.
00:14:21
Speaker
And the reality is the coatings don't matter that much. Again, these are gross generalizations, but the coatings don't matter, but there is actually a very different grind on a tool that's meant for aluminum or steel or even stainless steel or tool steel. And so this idea that you have an uncoated tool that lets it be more versatile, there may be some examples. I think there probably are some examples where that's okay, but it's not a great scalable strategy to just tool up and have a bunch of stuff and use it on anything. Put it that way.
00:14:48
Speaker
Generalization, yeah. So I grabbed a 5.16s Lakeshore tool for steel ball nose and it worked out quite well because I had to drop the plane down anyways to get that gouge out and oh man, looks good now. Perfect. Nice. Yeah, I was at a shop and they were saying that
00:15:12
Speaker
Coatings may add 10% of tool life, but for the most part, this shop doesn't use coatings for a lot of stuff. They just run uncoated tools. And it seems to work great for them. I mean, there's obviously some benefit in coatings, whether it's actual, theoretical, or just makes you feel better. Well, obviously, John, they look cool. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
00:15:39
Speaker
So that was really fun. The Fusion 5-axis stuff was just... I mean, not easy because there was some stuff that kicked my butt, but I am comfortable and good enough now to get to where I generally can get the toolpath I want. So really focusing on parallel, contour, pencil. I'm still struggling with big time.
00:16:00
Speaker
And Swarf is, Swarf isn't that bad now for me, really. It's a lot of the settings in parallel and contour with regard to how you, so three things all kind of tie together. Your tolerance, your boundary containment, and your, you know, avoid touch and whether you use that as a touch or avoid and the tolerance for that setting. Yep. Okay. I'm saying knowledge because I'm assuming that at some point you're going to be
00:16:29
Speaker
you're going to be doing the same thing. You bet your butt. So I was thinking about that, going that you and I have been around the five-axis world for many years now. We've got a lot of friends with five-axis. We hear these words, swarf and pencil and flow and all that for years and years. And I've played with the toolpaths a little bit, and you have too. But is it different having your own machine writing your own toolpaths and having to actually understand them and know them? 100% completely different.
00:16:59
Speaker
Like, like, can you even prepare for that or like you can a little bit, but is it different to just be like, okay, now it's time to go. Now it's time to work. It's always more rewarding when you, when you have to go cut the part and make the part and you're invested in it. I would, I guess, but you get that back and forth flow, right? Yeah. But the truth is, the truth is the Theo part, I mean, a lot of the learning was just, I mean, when you, you could, the tool, it's WYSIWYG when the tool path,
00:17:25
Speaker
is not doing whisper cuts. It's not rolling over an edge. You can actually see it in the visual representation of the toolpath. So that is a good thing. Now that doesn't tie into the kinematics of the machine, but that's really only an issue when you move into true five. So I guess in theory, you could lock yourself in an office and teach yourself some pretty darn good, successful five-axis stuff, but that's not really fun.
00:17:53
Speaker
unless it's on a part that's upcoming that you're actually going to make eventually. You know, say you order a five axis six month delivery. You're like, OK, I'm going to make a Norseman with five axis rotating center point correction, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, you could figure that out. Well, or said, in other words, the next part that I have to do, it will be much easier for me to get it right on the first try and know what I'm looking for.
00:18:23
Speaker
Yeah. I don't need to make chips and then look at it and say, well, what happened? The one thing that is crazy that you start to realize is when you're working with tolerances in a true global sphere of five axis, you start to realize, oh my gosh, it's the stuff that we've heard before, but it means so much more when you're living it. If you tip the part over,
00:18:49
Speaker
The one thing that's true is that it's not right. It's not perfectly oriented. There's ways to compensate for that in the control or ways to just have a physical mechanical alignment that's incredibly close to the point where the distance or the error is irrelevant. We had no problems in the UMC per se at all.
00:19:08
Speaker
It starts to make you appreciate the stack of everything from holder run out to the tool run out to your lead-ins to your positional accuracy of the machine tool because if you cut with the part straight up and then you tip it over and cut on the side of it, well, if those two didn't have perfect motion between the two and it's a little bit of line, now all of a sudden you have an error in your part.
00:19:31
Speaker
Yeah, I was thinking also the stack up of multiple risers and vices and things like that. But I guess with five axes, you pretty much want to do everything in one setup in one setup.
00:19:42
Speaker
So that's what we're trying. We have a bunch of parts to do now and pretty normal workflow where we're trying to do everything critical in one, everything locationally in one. And then obviously there is going to be sometimes there's an op zero to do a like a grip or fixture and then there could be an op two that's just like a backside deck chamfer probing off of machined location stuff. So I think that's going to be a good
00:20:05
Speaker
workflow. We have two different parts to do that need really long hole to diameters. And so we're going to try one of them is a one inch hole, one of them is a point one seven inch hole. So the extreme opposites of diameters in both of them, we're going to try drilling halfway through one side, rotating the C and then drilling the other. The 173 hole is just a basically clearance hole, the
00:20:30
Speaker
The one inch hole is a, it'll get reamed afterward, but still the alignment between those two will affect the reamer. So we'll see how that works.
Shop Updates and Incidents
00:20:42
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. It'll be interesting to see if a pin drops through or what lower size pin it requires to actually clear. Yeah. I'm not worried about the machine. I'm more worried about the drill.
00:20:56
Speaker
kind of blocking. Yeah, maybe we'll see. We're going to try one of those allied, you know, those, you ever seen those like insert spade drills? Yeah. Try one of those. Yeah. It's fine. Sorry. It's fine. That's great. What do you have to that's been super busy, busting out saga pocket clips like crazy. Yeah.
00:21:23
Speaker
Yeah, machines have been running probably six, seven hours a day, every day for the past week, making clips. We've probably made 80 or so. When you say six or seven hours, I'm surprised it wasn't 16 or 17 hours. You can't leave this one alone. Oh, really? Yeah.
00:21:45
Speaker
It ejects the part well, but one time Angelo said it didn't eject the part. And if that happens, bad things happen. Actually crashed delayed last week. You're just going to, you're just going to casually throw that in there 27 minutes into the podcast. Moving on. Um, no, what happened? It, um, I think the bar was getting stuck in the bar liner.
00:22:07
Speaker
And one of the tools broke. That's what it was. A little eighth inch ball mill broke. And supposed to do a bunch of contouring and cut the part off. And the part didn't get cut off. So it was pulling bar all the way across the travel of the enclosure. Normally, it's supposed to grab the part home, the B-axis, move it to the other side so that there's a big gap between the bar and the part. But it pulled the bar out.
00:22:36
Speaker
Why did the main spindle collet open and allow, or did it pull the bar through a Titan collet?
00:22:43
Speaker
No, it opened. I forget why it opened. I think I had to for some error to be cleared. I think I fixed that though. But anyway, the bar was pulled out like 10 or 18 inches further than it was supposed to be. And then when it goes to spit the part into the parts ejector, it just crashed right into the bar. And we were standing at the top of the stairs and we heard this loud bang. And we're like, was that us?
00:23:06
Speaker
I think because sometimes the neighbors make a lot of noise. And then we go over and there's an alarm and luckily no damage, no problem. Nothing's out of alignment. Everything's good. But geez, kind of makes you worried. This is a half inch titanium bar.
00:23:24
Speaker
Yeah, 5.8. 5.8. I guess I feel like your Nakamura could just turn into a sheer, like, no problem, like, I will see you and shear you. Yeah, there's load sensing on the machine, so it luckily noticed right away.
00:23:43
Speaker
when it was doing that. It was a good learning experience because, okay, we got to put safeties in place. We got to clean this up, make sure that happens. How do you know if a tool breaks? If an eighth inch end mill breaks, you almost can't even use tool load monitoring because it's not loading. It's such a tiny tool doing such tiny cuts that it doesn't really know if it's seeing a load in the cut. Well, you could. If it breaks, the flute will break off, right? That's a given.
00:24:14
Speaker
Yeah, the whole tool. Okay, so yeah, the problem is you don't want to break an unbroken tool. So in other words, you don't want to try to have the tool touch the material and do a load. It's not sensitive. The machine's not sensitive enough to do that and not damage the tool. It would be not damaged the tool maybe. Yeah. Can't put your can't use your turret probe. That's irrelevant for this, right? Right. Yeah, I know. That's a tough one.
00:24:42
Speaker
Yeah, there are fancy systems for like 20 grand that you can install with extra sensors and it can detect stuff like this based on vibration and all that. But I'm surprised. Anyway, aside from that, it's not that delicate or small. I'm surprised it's not creating some it's sticking out kind of far. And we were able to choke up on it by at least an eighth of an inch, if not more. And that that increased the rigidity totally like we haven't had a problem since.
00:25:13
Speaker
Could you move to a quarter inch shank tool that's tapered down to one eighth of an inch? I would like to. That would be sweet. Except not really, because I need the flute length to be what it is. Wouldn't say flute length, but just have it tapered. I mean, do you need it? It's not going into a, I don't know. Yeah, I know what you're saying.
00:25:37
Speaker
Yeah, I already did. Um, I thought about having some stuff custom made just to make the shank stronger and the flutes only as long as they need to be, um, would certainly help. But like I said, I was able to choke up on it quite a bit and that seems to be perfect. And then we figure tools last for about 50 parts and then replace them. And then keep, yeah, one eighth engine mill, like that's no big deal at all to replace that. Huh? It's like eight bucks. Um,
00:26:07
Speaker
Yeah, so but otherwise it's been super duper, duper, duper, duper, duper solid. It made one bad part at the end of the night last night. I'm like, what the heck happened? Like the boar was way too big.
00:26:19
Speaker
And I'll figure that out. I just turned it off and went home. What did you ever get? What were you trying to do? Get the cycle time down or something else that was really bothering you? The tolerances? Cycle time, surface finish, tolerances. Everything's dialed. It's also amazing now. Yeah, we're going to have to tear down and make some other parts here real soon, but milk it for as long as we can until then.
00:26:48
Speaker
Wait, you can't, uh, yeah, eight days till, uh, swishish arrives, huh? But that'll be, uh, I mean, what's it realistically, what's it going to be three weeks to get an actual grim snow part off of it? I don't know. Yeah, maybe not. I don't know either.
Future Shop Planning and Efficiency
00:27:06
Speaker
There's like install and set up and all the parts have to come in and the high pressure coolant and the bar feeder. And yeah.
00:27:12
Speaker
There's a lot of annoying stuff. So anyway, super excited about that. Cause the lathe comes, the Swiss lathe comes in about a week, week tomorrow, allegedly. What do you mean allegedly? Basically I got one email. Well, I got one email from them saying, uh, I think we can get a rigger for next Thursday. So I was like, I'm posting it on Instagram. Cause I know you guys watch this. I'm locking this in. Is it, am I going to lose, you're going to lose this, uh, your, your podcast spot, your standing desk. Yeah.
00:27:42
Speaker
they were moving desks and tables and arrangement and everything. So figure I'll put a GoPro up in the corner and do a time lapse of just the rearrangement. It's going to get tightened here with that Swiss. Yeah. But very excited. The Transformers here, we're going to put that in place. Good. Yeah, it's going to be good. And then on top of that, I'm also looking for a bigger shop. Any update on that?
00:28:08
Speaker
As a, yeah, I forget how much I've said on the podcast, but I've told you either privately or publicly a lot about it. Um, I was looking at one great shop out in the country, fell through looking at another shop, like a block and a half away. Um, 8,000 square feet. Great price needs a bunch of work. Um,
00:28:27
Speaker
That could go, it could not go, I'm not sure yet. And then my guy told me about another place today that's 5,000 square feet that already has epoxy painted floors like brand new. So I'm going to go look at that today just to add some data points to my collection and see what I want.
00:28:46
Speaker
If there's one takeaway I've had over the past month of going through some thinking about our layout and our flow and how we work with each other and how we process material, move stuff through, and we work with big parts, like our fixture plates are actually large. Right.
00:29:06
Speaker
There is a benefit, bigger is not better. I mean, yes, there's no substitute for size if you need forklifts or large machine tools, but otherwise, I think you gain a lot by recognizing that real estate is precious. It costs money and you don't want to spread out. There is not a correlation between
00:29:29
Speaker
size and efficiency. In fact, I could argue it's the opposite. Good grief, John. Look at when we walk through K2, the Kern Job Shop, or excuse me, K1. Heck, both of the facilities. Those are not expansive labyrinths of things. They are small and tight. Obviously, yes, you need a new shop. I completely agree with that, but 3,000 to 5,000 square feet, I would think would do it.
00:29:59
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, of course, I've drawn it up in fusion. So I was like, Okay, so if I have a thousand square feet, what does it look like? Put all my stuff in it. We do want to build out rooms that are like, this is the dusty grinding room. And this is the tumbling room that's maybe sound insulated so that it's just quieter. Because otherwise, you just got loud noise all the time, maybe put the air compressor either in there or in a different quieter room.
00:30:24
Speaker
So kind of like, I very much hesitate to segregate all the people in their respective roles, because that just, you know, separates everybody. I don't like the thought of that. But there's definite benefits to having like, this is the dirty room where all the grinding happens and all the dust and keep that crap away from the machines and from the precision stuff.
00:30:46
Speaker
Well, just think about, go back to this capital triage mentality of if you want 8,000 square feet, recognize it costs you something and what it costs you could be the equivalent of the payments on another spindle or something like that. It's also not necessarily your forever shop. It's always strange to have that mentality of like, well, I'll only be here for four years, but the reality is it doesn't have to be your forever shop and it statistically most likely won't be.
00:31:17
Speaker
Yeah, so don't overextend yourself by buying or renting a 15,000 square foot shop just because it's available and you're only using 4,000 of it. It's complete wasting money.
00:31:30
Speaker
Yeah, so it is interesting because I have to look at least the next three to five years to see how much are we going to utilize, put everything we have in it now, what are the plans for the next three to five years, what other machinery, equipment, products, workflows, people, and make sure that this next move can support five years of growth.
00:31:49
Speaker
and not hinder us too much, but also not just be empty, not be wasted space. Also recognize, number one, you and I have mutually agreed that we overthink things. Number two, when you moved into the shop you're at right now, would you have ever thought you would own what you own or you could fit ... I mean, good grief, John. When you were ... Think back to the video when you and Eric were doing the floors.
00:32:10
Speaker
Would you have ever looked at somebody's in high and said, yeah, I can fit a DMG more editor, vertical 5100 and not commercial made a laughing machine, a tumbler, you know, Swiss way with five and five employees at bench grinding stations, workstations, heat treat like no, you would have said absolutely not and need to get the shop next door. Yeah, yeah, no. And
00:32:39
Speaker
You know, you asked me that three and a half, almost four years ago, would I think that we would need to grow to like a shop that's eight times bigger, you know, within four years. I've been like, this place is huge. What are you talking about? Solve the problem at hand, which is going from one to whatever. So what are you in now, 1500?
00:32:59
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, three to five seems... I don't mean to back... Yeah, three would be tight. But five, yeah, like laying out the plan. If we get a five-axis machine, if we get... I could see us buying another Swiss eventually, depending on how productive it is. But I got a plan for all this stuff and I got to support the vision, the idea.
00:33:24
Speaker
But yeah, it's nice to see what's out there and visiting some shops and visiting some layouts and like, oh, this is garbage or this could work. This could be really nice or this is huge. That's exciting. Well, you got to try to solve that problem the next month or two, if you can. If we can be living there by September, I'm pretty happy. That's four months away.
00:33:53
Speaker
Cause there's time to do stuff, you know, but it's a lot, but yeah, it's good to plan now.
Productivity and Task Management
00:34:02
Speaker
Yep. You know, I've been actually thinking a bit about the last week's podcast, which I really did enjoy. And I, um, watched the Ted talk that you mentioned from, uh, what's his name?
00:34:13
Speaker
Yes, David Allen, which I will readily admit was better than I expected. And I think it was, I think I missed the point that creating the to do list has less to do with an obligation to do it and more to do with freeing your mind of the feeling of needing to track stuff.
00:34:38
Speaker
which seems like you're tricking yourself. And I feel like it's what I've done for the past years is made these lists and not follow through on them. And maybe it's weird to think about, but maybe that's actually the right way to do it. Is that somehow intentional? So do you though follow what he says where you'll sit down on a regular basis and actually look at your list?
00:35:01
Speaker
It is a struggle and I've created like I read the book straight through the past month or two.
00:35:10
Speaker
I haven't reviewed my list in three weeks. You're supposed to do it every week. And every weekend, I'm like, doing it this weekend, doing it this weekend. So it's been three weeks of not doing it yet. I will because I really, really, really want to follow that system properly. And just to play it out, just to see how it works, I think it'll be super helpful. But yeah, the key is to kind of extract all the great ideas from your mind into a system, review them often, and sort the
00:35:38
Speaker
forest for the trees, you know, like the good ones from the bad ones and say, Yeah, this has to get done. I think you've already answered the question, which is, you don't want to do it. I'm not faulting you at all. I am the exact same way. And there's every one. Well, the trick is, like, so many good ideas on that list. And I physically do want to I just, I haven't yet. So something's holding me back from doing it. Everything else is more important or whatever. But that's a good thing. I know there's good ideas.
00:36:07
Speaker
and I don't want to lose them, but at least I have them written down, so I'm really happy about that. I was talking to somebody yesterday who just bought a UR10 robot and I was like, oh my gosh, that's awesome coincidence. I just released a video on Lauren's shop tour. They have a UR10. When I saw one,
00:36:23
Speaker
When I was on the Germany trip talking with a guy who's done a lot with automation at their shop in Nebraska, I thought, okay, we will have a robot at some point. I could totally see how it fits. I could frankly see how it fits today. It fits in with the nerdiness, the technology, the I love robots, we're building 25, blah, blah, blah. It was such an easy thing to put on the
00:36:45
Speaker
know list right now because I don't even have anywhere near that capacity or need or ability to be a surgeon on that project. Having the conviction to just say, no, it doesn't mean I'm not going to do it eventually, but I don't need to be spending time thinking about it.
00:37:02
Speaker
Well, something like that, you're not going to forget about it. It's just a matter of waiting, of removing it from your mind, being like, not right now, I'm good. I got other things to focus on. I guess it'd be interesting because if somebody like David Allen agrees that you need to get it out of your head right on the list, but there isn't necessarily the need to follow up on it, my argument would almost be, why can't you just train yourself or why can't you get to the point where you just recognize you should forget about it?
00:37:31
Speaker
I think the point is because it's it's hard for our brains. What do I want to say in the moment to wonder if to understand if it's a really good or a really bad idea. And the idea is to get it on the list. And then as you're going through the list, like in the weekly review, which I did do one or two of them. The point is to kind of look at it with not much emotion and not much action on that part. But
00:37:58
Speaker
What is it? You want to figure out what the outcome is of that to do and what is the very first action that you can do? What does it look like when it's done? It's fair. Then what has to get done? Sometimes it's easier or harder than you think. The point is to bang through the list and come up with those two answers for every single thing on the list.
00:38:20
Speaker
prioritize them from there, like next action has to get done or like someday maybe list. Right. I will say, I think I mentioned this last week, but I have found it's been great to just do stuff. This idea that let's sound silly, but let's say I have something on my desk that I would need to walk back to a toolbox that's relatively far away. Well, I used to think, well, I'll leave it here and I'll wait till I have one or two more things and I'll batch it up together because the reality is at the end of the day,
00:38:50
Speaker
I in no way feel less productive because I took the 72 seconds to walk something over, put it back and come back. And in fact, it's the exact opposite where it feels I've made the right decision. I've made a behavior that I want to be embraced within our shop overall, which is take the time to put stuff away. And I think Jay Pearson again had a great quote when I was talking to him the other day that it's like, I'm kind of twisting his words here, but there's things that are
00:39:20
Speaker
What did he say? Problems or symptoms. I can't remember how he said it, but basically the fact that you think you're losing efficiency because you have to put something away just means what you should be having to sit like that should be able to happen because the reality is you should have a machine already running or you should have a project underway and so you have some downtime to go do that. It's casual. It's not creating stress. You're not so wound up that you worry about the fact that you need to go walk and put something away. It's okay. No big deal.
00:39:50
Speaker
Yeah, I think the only downside to the urgency of doing something like that is the reality of being distracted. You know, you walk through the shop, you see a thing, you do a thing, and then 30 minutes later, you're like, wait, what was I doing? Yeah, it hasn't bothered me. You're right. It just hasn't, it hasn't been a problem. And
00:40:10
Speaker
You are who you want to be. If I want to walk from the bathroom back to my desk and I want to see something that's out of place or wrong or whatever, I want to be the person that, yeah, it's okay. I'm going to spend a minute and pick that up. That's not getting hairbrained and scatterbrained and jumping all over the place.
00:40:30
Speaker
I also don't want to be in an environment where my time is so precious that any lack of productivity there results in bad outcome. You know what I mean? It sounds easy to talk about this stuff, but it's not only hard to implement, but as we're starting to find little successes there, it feels very rewarding.
Advanced Material Techniques
00:40:48
Speaker
It's interesting to learn deeper into how we individually work. What works best for you?
00:40:56
Speaker
It's not so much maximizing. I mean, it is, but it's it's not like minute to minute. I got to be super productive and super. It's just like figuring out the flow that makes you happiest throughout the day and still gets it all done. Yes. What's the I've always had this kind of like you ever you kind of live out these pipe dreams in your head or you think about stuff like like I would love to shadow you for a day, John, but only under the pretense that you didn't know I was there.
00:41:23
Speaker
Yeah, because it doesn't work if you are, because you absolutely will change that. Totally. I don't know. Maybe next time I'll come up, maybe I will try to, maybe I'll just bring my own like work to do and I'll just kind of sit in your shop for an afternoon and observe and have you guys try to ignore that I'm here. You want to do that? But don't, right? I can put headphones on, like it's kind of curious to see what it's like. Right. Right. Yeah. Yeah.
00:41:53
Speaker
Speaking of your shop, what the heck? Why do you have liquid nitrogen? It's been on my list for many years. To heat treat the blades. So it is a mid process cryogenic treatment to the blades, which further strengthens the grain structure and actually gives you one or two points harder of steel without any downsides. Cool. So yeah, it's
00:42:22
Speaker
It's always been known as a really good thing to do. Not required for every steel, but for our steel, it's beneficial. And yeah, basically, since Sky's been working here for a year and Angelo for just over a year, they're both like, when are we getting Cryo? When are we going to add this step? It's going to make better products. So eventually, we got our Dewar. We just got it filled yesterday. Yeah, Sky's been nerding out all the research. That's the vessel that holds it?
00:42:52
Speaker
Interesting. Yes. D-E-W-A-R. Well, so it's like an insulated, um, or method D-E-W-A-R. Yeah. Plug apparently liquid nitrogen exists. No, it's just, uh, so does it have a shelf life? Okay. Yes. So the 10 liters that we filled up will evaporate to an unusable amount in like two to four weeks.
00:43:21
Speaker
So we have to take it back and it filled up often. But yeah, apparently liquid nitrogen expands at a rate of 621 to one or something like that. So you can't seal the container or else it'll explode. So it literally has like a foam core in the top that just you drop the foam core down and now it's sealed. And there's a little clicky plastic cap on top. So it's just always venting? So if it tipped over, yeah, it's always venting. If it tipped over, it would spill.
00:43:48
Speaker
Somewhat, not a lot. I have to ask the 10-year-old question, the immature silly kid question. If I put my finger in it, my finger is toast, right? It was free solid. Apparently, this is not OSHA approved. But if it splashes on your skin, it'll just boil itself off and then not really cause any damage. A quick spray is no big deal. But obviously, if you dip your finger in it, it'll probably break off by the time you pull it out, permanent nerve damage or whatever.
00:44:19
Speaker
So there's certain like, it's, it can be very, very dangerous. Um, but yeah, we're going to recreate the final scene terminator too, then, because that was a very influential moment of my childhood. Of course, of course. Um, I think the liquid itself is stable, but when you put something warmer inside, the liquid literally boils. It bubbles. How much does a four liters cost?
00:44:48
Speaker
10 liters is 50 bucks. Yeah. So it's not really expensive or prohibitively inaccessible. Do you have to get a license or a permit? That's crazy. That's cool. Different. Yeah.
00:45:03
Speaker
Yeah, so basically the blades come out of the hot oven at 1,940 degrees or whatever, and then they get quenched, and then they get put into the cryo for one and a half plus hours. Holy cow. And then they come out, go to room temperature, and then into temper for two hours at 100 degrees. Wow. I would think the cryo would be like 10 seconds.
00:45:26
Speaker
No, because you really want to stabilize the steel. You want it to be at negative 321 degrees Fahrenheit. I guess I thought it would be like a quench, I should say. Interesting. Right.
Project Excitement and Podcast Conclusion
00:45:40
Speaker
Cool. Yeah, so it's way better.
00:45:47
Speaker
Well, I am off to work on the new project, which we are like, I don't know, maybe one to two weeks away from the kind of beta ish type stuff. So, um, I am excited to stop talking general vaguely about it and really dive into it. Really am excited. Yeah. That's awesome. Well, I can't wait to start hearing that season all about that. Are you obtaining today? More clips. Um, look at that second shop.
00:46:15
Speaker
All kinds of little stuff. We are doing blade shows coming up in four weeks.
00:46:23
Speaker
we're doing our as we crossed knife number 1775, we're like, oh, 1776 is next. That's like the big American year, right? 1776. Let's do some crazy, like engraving pattern with, you know, 13 colonies flag on it or something like that. So that was many months ago and probably 600 knives ago, whatever your pass that you're that we just kind of, you know, like we kept it apart, but we never got around to it.
00:46:53
Speaker
So we're going to finish it up. We're going to bring it to blade show. And uh, so I got to do that today. So I got to finish coding the engraving and get it engraved. And it's going to be a multi-stage engraving, anodizing, engraving, anodizing, engraving, anodizing to get a bunch of different colors. Same thing. So I got to film that now that I think about it. Aaron's on vacation. So I like how to look at anything. That's cool. Yeah. Yeah. So that's what I'm up to today. I will see you next week. Have a great day.